Surrender of the XX Corps in the Augustów Forest

On 21 February 1915 in the Augustów Forest the Russian XX Corps of General Pavel Bulgakov, part of General Thadeus von Sievers’s 10th Army, capitulated. Surrounded by the Germans, its divisions had for several days been trying to break through the snowbound woods to the fortress of Grodno. Out of ammunition and food, after a last failed attempt to break out of the encirclement, they laid down their arms. It was the heaviest Russian loss in the Winter Battle of Masuria.

A belated retreat

When at the beginning of February two German armies struck the flanks of the 10th Army, the XX Corps stood in the centre, facing the Masurian Lakes. It was an exceptionally large corps, reinforced with additional divisions. At that time it comprised the 27th, 28th, 29th and 53rd Infantry Divisions. By mid-February the Germans, advancing from the north and the south, already controlled the roads in its rear. Army headquarters hesitated over which way to withdraw the corps and kept changing its orders. Bulgakov left Suwałki only at dawn on 16 February.

That same day the leading 27th Division ran into scattered units of the German 42nd Infantry Division at Macharce, at a junction of forest roads. The Russians routed them in a fight lasting several hours and captured eight guns, but Bulgakov did not exploit his success and put off the further march until the next day. On 17 February the Germans took Augustów. The neighbouring corps, the III Siberian and the XXVI, managed to cross the Biebrza and slip out of the pincers. The XX Corps set off through the forests along the Augustów Canal towards Sopoćkinie. Infantry, artillery and baggage trains moved in a single crowded column, while German units attacked its rearguard.

Encircled

On the evening of 17 February the main body of the corps halted for the night near Mikaszówka. Bulgakov did not know that Sopoćkinie was already in German hands, and he lost control of the situation. Over the following days the divisions tried to break through to the east. Around 19 February, in heavy fighting near Hołynka, the 29th Division and one of the regiments of the 53rd Division lost, according to the Polish historian Stanisław Czerep, as much as two-thirds of their strength. A thaw turned the forest roads into mud, while frost and snowstorms returned by turns.

At the urging of junior officers Bulgakov agreed to a last attempt to break through to Grodno during the night of 20–21 February. According to Czerep, some 30,000 soldiers, more than 150 guns and several thousand horses were to pass in a single column over the only bridge on the route and get out of the forest before dawn. It was impossible. The departure was delayed, and towards morning the main body gathered near the Młynek farmstead, where the Germans surrounded it on three sides. After a short, unequal fight the corps surrendered. Help from Grodno did not arrive in time.

Prisoners

The exact number of prisoners is disputed. German propaganda spoke of a “second Tannenberg”, and a German study published in 1918 on the orders of the General Staff gave some 30,000 prisoners, 11 generals and about 200 guns. Czerep estimates that the corps had about 30,000 men at the start of the battle, of whom 20,000–24,000 were taken prisoner. Other studies give as few as 12,000. Russian sources mention that some soldiers managed at the last moment to fight their way through to their own lines. Some also give 22 February as the day on which Bulgakov himself went into captivity with his staff.

Bulgakov spent the rest of the war in German captivity and returned to Russia only in 1918. In Russia the fighting of the XX Corps quickly became the stuff of legend. It was stressed that its stubborn defence had tied down considerable German forces and given the other corps of the 10th Army time to retreat and occupy a new defensive line from Grodno to the Biebrza. Historians point out, however, that the disaster was largely the result of indecision among the commanders, from Sievers to Bulgakov himself. At Macharce, Mikaszówka and Rudawka, in today’s Gmina Płaska, there are still cemeteries in which German and Russian soldiers killed in February 1915 are buried.